Tuesday, 31 January 2017

Who Reviews The Four Doctors Hardback Edition Comic Book Review by Tony J Fyler

The Four Doctors
Hardback Edition

Tony stiffens his spine
for The Four Doctors.

How are your shelves
looking?

If you think that’s an odd
question, you haven’t been on social media lately. Who-fans love their shelves.
It probably started with the Target books, all lined up, rigorously
chronological for the most part, with the odd maverick preferring to line up their
stories by author, or those who simply didn’t have the necessary touch of OCD
to be a real fan going simply Doctor as a way of declaring their more bohemian,
laissez-faire credentials (and freaking out any of their fussbudget fan-friends
any time they hung out). Then there’d be the annuals – did you put them all
together in one semi-collection of their own, or intersperse them through the
Target books? The weird little books like Terry Nation’s book of Daleks, the
Doctor Who Cookbook and Knitwear guide, the slablike wonders of the Peter
Haining books. Then, holy of holies, videos! And videos begat DVDs, and DVDs
begat blu rays (all together, or strictly chronological?), begat audio CDs,
begat action figures in a range of sizes, begat bobble heads, begat remote
controlled Daleks, begat voice changers, comic-books for five Doctors, begat
part-works, begat autographed art, begat an insanity of wonders that has
reached a pitch where Who-fans are sharing pictures of their collections, their
shelves of glory, all over the social world.

What’s the point, you
wonder?

The point is that shelves
are important. Even in our Kindletastic, streamaholic, vaguely ephemeral age,
shelves are important to Doctor Who fans. There’s something altogether
different about the feeling of possession, of ownership you get when something
chunky and glorious sits on your shelf to the feeling you get from owning it in
any other way. It feels like a proper part of ‘the collection’ then.

Comic-book collectors of
course have a tricky conundrum when it comes to their collection, simply
because of the relative flimsiness of the medium. Do you stand them all up, as
you would do with books? Tricky. Do you lay them flat, one on top of the other?
Mmmmaybe, but there’s a feeling of a lack of care that niggles along with the
idea of them being ‘a pile,’ rather than given their proper place. Do you
invest in plastic covers, as most comic-book stores do, to keep them pristine?
And then oh the joys of numbering and storage.

When these two geekdoms
collide, the challenge becomes quite severe. How do you handle your Who
comic-books as part of your shelves?

Titan Comics regularly
helps a geek out – while we’re unlikely to be able to wait for the next
instalment of comic-book adventuring, and so duly buy the flimsy 30-odd page
issues as soon as they’re out, every now and again, Titan puts out a
‘collected’ version, with sterner spines that can stand as part of the
collection, that feel more kin to ‘books’ than they do to ‘comics.’ The
collected versions are more like graphic novels, and stand on your shelves
perfectly well. But every once in a while, there’s a need for something even
more permanent, more memorable.

2015 was a great year to
be both a Who fan and a comic-book fan. Not only did we really get into the
swing of Doctor Who comic-books from Titan, we added the Ninth Doctor to the
mix, then the Eighth followed (I’m still waiting for this to be extended
further back in the timeline – we know there are Fourth Doctor comic-books
coming, but will there be Fifth, Sixth, Seventh? Be still our beating hearts,
will there be First, Second and Third?). But even among the embarrassment of
riches we got in 2015, one series of five comic-books stood out.

The Four Doctors, written
by Paul Cornell, drawn by Neil Edwards and coloured by Ivan Nunes, was in many
respects the belated Fiftieth Anniversary Special many fans had been hoping
for. While I bow to no-one in my appreciation of what we actually got for the
Fiftieth on-screen, you just know it would have been more fun had there been
more active snark between the Doctors, a la The Three Doctors. And you equally
know that the Series 8 Twelfth Doctor had exactly the kind of snark that would
have really brought the whole thing to biting life. In fact, you don’t have to
just know it any more, because here it is, proven for you across five issues of
unadulterated joy. Cornell well and truly knows his Doctors, and gives them
each the very voice you remember. What’s at least as much, the story is mad and
wonderful, allowing Edwards to go to the coolest parts of town and live there –
soaring edifices, weird machines, tampered timelines, pesky paradoxes, dark
moments from the history of New Who, the majesty of Paris, Dalek mazes of
death, a fantastic – indeed possibly the best – Ninth Doctor villain, a
reinvigorated First Doctor enemy that looks better than ever and *cough, cough*
ready for a comeback, and ultimately, more Doctors than you can shake a sonic
stick at. To call it something special doesn’t really do it justice. It’s
must-own comic-bookery.

So the truth is, you
probably already own it. But now you can own it again.

No, it isn’t. I know what
you’re thinking, and no, it really isn’t just a way of getting you to pay twice
for something you’ve already read. The hardbacked edition (did you get that –
hardbacked. Ohhh, here is my money, please take it) of The Four Doctors takes a
thing of beauty and effectively dips it in chocolate. Which is to say it makes
it better.
Now The Four Doctors is grabbable as a five issue, unhook-the-phone, grab a
beverage and revel experience that stands, proudly, on your shelf when you’re
done with it, as a marker of the year that 2015 was, as a marker of Cornell’s
insane and glorious imagination, of Nunes’ rich, evocative colourwork and
Edwards’ dedication to filling every square inch with something interesting to
look at. As a marker of your being there, and being a fan in 2015, in exactly
the same way as the DVD of Terror of the Zygons stands there, or the blu ray of
Spearhead From Space, or your entire Target collection, or your Peter Haining
books. The hardbacked Four Doctors takes event an event comic-book and makes it
a must-have book. With releases like this, Big Finish going into overdrive,
and the Fourth Doctor soon joining his later incarnations in Titan comic-books,
one thing appears clear about 2016.